xp_logs | Emma & Doug

Emma had to admit she savoured the quietness in her mind. It had taken a stint in the Box combined with some esoteric meditation techniques in her sanctuary in the Astral Plane, as well as the application of her iron will, but in the end she had snapped the leash back on her telepathy and now she heard only what she chose to. It had allowed her a few days out of the Mansion, starting necessary negotiations for Frost Enterprises and clarifying losses, both financial and physical, from the Manhattan debacle.

Even from Boston, though, Emma had kept a watch on Doug's thoughts and the unabated intensity of his nightmares had brought her back to the Mansion as soon as her management team could take on the ongoing work, at least for a short while. Her arrival had coincided with one of the few times that he was in his suite and she had waited patiently for him to wake from his sleep, in what seemed to have become his usual panicked state, before she knocked on the door.

Doug's body modesty had been one of the casualties of the events in the New York Stock Exchange, and he had taken to sleeping in the nude, but he managed to wake up and regain enough mental capacity from the panic attack to put on a pair of boxers before answering the door. His mussed hair and the sheen of sweat on his arms and chest made him look particularly disheveled compared to Emma's casual, studied elegance. "Emma?" he asked in a sleepy and confused voice. "I thought you were in Boston."

"Until about two hours ago, you would have been right," said Emma. "But considering what goes on inside your head when you are supposed to be sleeping, did you think I wouldn't come back?"

Doug shrugged diffidently, a gesture that had become his default reply to just about any question or comment lately, it seemed. "I don't know. I've been managing." And he had been, depending on what your definition of 'managing' was.

"Managing?" Emma raised an eyebrow in mockery. "Living with Marie-Ange has obviously distorted your idea of what sleep is supposed to be like. Two hours at a time and waking from screaming nightmares is not what it's supposed to be like. In case you had forgotten." Her movement past Doug was so casual that you could not have told that he hadn't invited her in. "I'm not normally one to proffer my services unasked, but I can hardly absolve myself of responsibility in your case, Doug." She sat down on the couch and added quietly, "I listen for you on the Astral Plane, Doug. As long as Ignatova stalks your dreams, she stalks mine. I would prefer, for both our sakes, that she is consigned to the hell that she deserves."

Doug sat down mechanically on the couch next to Emma, with a puzzling disconnect in his head between the emotional impassivity that he'd been living in ever since Emma's adjustments, and the dawning intellectual realization that perhaps he should have some sort of emotional response to the things Emma was saying, and the quiet worry in her voice. "What...'services' did you have in mind?" he asked her slowly.

Emma sighed lightly. "I would like to put away your nightmares, Doug. Firstly. There are other things I need to do, but letting you sleep the night through is the first step. Without that step, re-connecting you emotionally will simply make the nightmares worse and I consider that - unnecessary for your development."

"Okay." Doug nodded, with the same blind trust in Emma that he had displayed when he had agreed to her stratagem against Ignatova. "What do you need from me?"

"Let me in," said Emma, smiling wryly at echoing her previous request. She did not need to wait for his answer; since her alterations Doug had never attempted to put up even rudimentary shields to keep her out. She reached out with her power and stepped back into Doug's mindscape. The hall of mirrors stretched open before and behind her. She could see the white-clad Doug in the distance, brought close by the multiple reflections. The doors they had closed so firmly remained shut. Emma did not attempt to approach the waiting Doug. Instead she turned to the side and reaching out her hand, plunged it into the closest mirror, reaching past Doug's reflection and into the darkness behind it. Her hand closed on something and she yanked it back out of the mirror and into the bright light of the hallway. "Hello Natalya," she said.

An inky, formless mass of circuitry twisted and writhed in Emma's iron grip, a set of teeth attempting to bite into the fleshy part of her hand while a number of whip-thin tentacles slashed at her wrist. It hissed wordlessly, a brain-crawlingly piercing sound. In the mirror it had been drawn from, Doug's naked form was immobilized in a circular ring reminiscent of Da Vinci's famous 'Vitruvian Man' drawings. Lengths of tubing connected to his body at certain points, and it seemed as though they were pumping required nutrients and fluids into him while simultaneously pulling out some inexplicably vital portion of his being.

"How very dramatic, Natalya," said Emma dryly and reached out with hands grown suddenly huge and diamond-hard. Her fingers closed around the tentacles that whipped her and folded them over, packing circuitry and tentacles ever smaller, until they were only a small ball in her hands. The ball writhed and twisted, attempting to slip from her grip, but Emma was relentless, crushing it smaller and smaller until it finally stopped struggling. "You have to remember," she said conversationally to the thing in her hands, "that you are dead. Doug won. You are just the lost echo of a damned soul." With that her fingers snapped closed, crushing the ball into nothingness and dust. Emma raised her hands, back to normal size and gently blew the dust away until into the air where it swirled briefly and then slipped into non-existence.

Emma turned to the mirror in front of her, the tortured image of Doug. "No more," said and reached back into the mirror. Her hands were gentle as she disconnected tubes, dispensing them to the same non-existence as she had the ghost of Ignatova. She helped the image of Doug free from its circular ring, that slid back into the darkness and vanished. Where her hands passed over the wounds caused by the tubes, the skin knit anew so when she was finished the image of Doug was naked, but whole and free from torment.

Turning back into the hallway, Emma walked down it, finally reaching what she thought of as the real Doug, the solid form of which all the others were reflections. "I have something for you," she said.

Doug was still wearing the outfit Emma had clad him in, but it was wrinkled and dingy in spots, as though Doug had been wearing it constantly since then, even sleeping in it. A bit of stubble dusted his face, and bags lay heavy under his eyes, showing the exhaustion that he was doing his best to cover up in the real world. He watched Emma like a hawk as she approached.

"What is it?" he finally asked skittishly. It wasn't that he didn't trust Emma, it was just that he was in so much pain. Pain he hadn't even realized was there until Emma had begun to heal it. And it was difficult to be trusting in any way when pain screamed along every neuron he had and all of his impulses were either to lash out or curl into a tiny fetal ball reminiscent of the way Emma and Marie-Ange had pulled him out of the remnants of Mastermold.

"Oh my poor Knight," breathed Emma. "Paying the price of battle." She reached out, her fingers gently stroking his temple for just a moment before dropping her hand back to her side. "I'm sorry, Doug. Some pain is necessary. That," she nodded back down the hall to the place where she had destroyed the image of Ignatova, "was not. Until I put you back together, what is in here will hurt. You are - in pieces." She looked down for a moment at her empty hands. "Some are lost forever. I couldn't save all of them, I'm sorry. But I have these," and suddenly her hands were no longer empty, filled instead by shifting shapes that could have been light, or computer chips, or diamonds. "Parts of you I salvaged from Ignatova. Parts of your consciousness. I've been keeping them safe, but it is time for you to take them back." She looked back up at Doug. "It should help with the pain. A little."

Doug looked at the contents of Emma's hands, a curious expression on his face. He remembered what Marie-Ange had said about needing to want to come back to what he was. Appealing to emotions that were stunted was not the answer, but perhaps appealing to his sense of curiosity and need to know things that had been left unchanged was. He reached out a hand tentatively towards Emma's, a desperation in his eyes, anxious for anything to heal the pain. "Which...which parts are they? And how do I..." Put them back. Keep going. Be a person again. All the different ways to end the question dammed up in his mouth.

"How do you? One step at a time, Doug. No matter what happens, no matter how bad it is, it's the only way to go forward. One small step at a time. And in the end, I promise, life is worth living again." Her eyes held his, filled with compassion. "As for the parts of you I hold: images, small things, memories of good times and bad, connections. The things I left outside this place, the things that Ignatova stripped away. But all parts of you, the real you. They will not heal you, not yet. With them, you will feel pain. Without them, you will feel nothing." She contemplated him for a moment, weighing up what to say. "I have tried both, Doug Ramsey. Believe me when I tell you, you do not want to go through your life feeling nothing. Because, if that's your choice, you might as well lie down on the floor and die right now."

Not that Doug hadn't considered both - feeling nothing or lying down on the floor - since being eaten up and spat back out by Mastermold, but neither was truly palatable to him. It wasn't that he felt nothing presently, just that his emotions were more like the muted 'phantom pain' that amputees often reported, a low background ache that he was only aware of now that Emma had drawn attention to it. And as difficult as some things had been since then, it was not in Doug to simply give up. Emma had told him that life was worth living, hopefully the things she had salvaged would help make it so. "Help me," he asked her quietly. "Please."

"Always," said Emma. Carefully she closed her hands around what they held; when she opened them they appeared empty. She placed those empty hands against Doug's temples and let what she had salvaged flow through her fingers, a puzzle of pieces of Doug's life. Emma was capable of breathtaking artistry with her telepathy and she used those skills now, slotting each puzzle piece back into its place, melding the edges perfectly with what was there. Slowly she filled gaps, though gaping holes remained. Most would fill when she opened the doors she had closed, but some pieces she knew were lost forever, although she hoped those pieces were few.

She released the last piece of Doug's consciousness back to him, inspected the internal construct of his mind carefully. It looked to her like a lacework bridge, shimmering delicately, but a whole structure nonetheless. Using her skills she buttressed the more fragile pieces, loaned strength where it threatened to collapse, until she felt that it was stable enough to survive. It was not complete and Doug would feel the strain of those empty places far more than he had felt the strain of nothingness, but it was recognisably Doug.

With a sigh, Emma retreated back from her own image of Doug's mindscape, back into the hall of mirrors and the Doug that stood before her. She took his hand gently in hers and then stepped back into the real world, back to the couch and the startled gaze of the real Doug.

"Does that help?" she asked softly.

"It...it..." Doug prodded at the pathways Emma had restored, pushing at them with his brain like a child pushes at a loose tooth with his tongue. Emotions that had been stored away and hidden behind locked doors broke loose down those pathways in a chaotic torrent, washing over him, and he buried his head in Emma's lap, crying in a jumble of pain and fear and joy and sorrow and a hundred other feelings.

"Perhaps no," said Emma softly, stroking Doug's hair gently as he wept. "Or perhaps yes."